The Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic is endowed by the Barton Fund, a donor advised fund established at The Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, Inc. in March 2000 by Andy and Michelle Barclay.  Andy and Michelle have worked with the child protection system in Georgia for a number of years and saw a need for research and policy analysis in this area.  The need was so great that they personally established a foundation fund to endow an organization or program that would provide child-focused, research-based information to practitioners in the field of child protection to improve practice and policies affecting children.

Prior to the creation of the Barton Fund, Michelle and Andy participated in an ongoing dialogue about the need to develop a multi-disciplinary center to focus on child advocacy issues.  When the Barton Fund was established, Michelle and Andy decided that the best way to accomplish their goal of systemic reform was to partner with an existing organization that could bring together a variety of disciplines to conduct research and use the results for systemic practice and policy improvements in the Georgia child protection system, both at the agency level and at the state legislative level.

A partnership between the Barton Fund and Emory University allowed both organizations to build on past work and move toward these goals.  Emory Law School has had a summer child advocacy program since 1992 that trains students to be child advocates and provides paid summer internships for work in child advocacy offices.  In addition, Emory University has professors in the schools of public health, medicine, nursing, and the department of sociology who work with the Division of Family and Childrens Services (DFCS), child advocacy organizations, or the law school summer child advocacy program, who are interested in developing a multi-disciplinary program to train child advocates.

The Barton Fund endowment will provide between $70,000 and $90,000 in operating costs for the Clinic each year.  All other expenses will be borne by Emory School of Law and other funding sources that are yet to be identified.  Over the first two and a half years of the partnership, the law school will provide funds equal to or exceeding those provided by the Barton Fund.  The Barton Fund is actively seeking funds from other sources to pay for additional staff and specific projects.  In January 2001 Emory School of Law received $94,250 from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to establish a senior policy fellow position in the Barton Clinic.  This one-year grant is renewable upon successful completion of the grant objectives and demonstrated need for continuation.

Although the Barton Clinic is a newly established entity, Michelle and Andy Barclay and the Clinic director, Karen Worthington, are well-entrenched in the child advocacy community in Georgia and nationally.  Michelle Barclay has ten years experience as a nurse in Georgia.  After returning to law school to become an attorney, she became the director of the Georgia Supreme Court Child Placement Project, a federally funded program to improve the way courts handle abuse and neglect cases.   In this position Michelle has worked closely with judges, attorneys and DFCS workers across the state.  Since retiring from his work in information technology in the late 1990s, Andy Barclay has spent much of his time as a volunteer, building databases and web sites and provided statistical support for over a dozen area non-profits, most of which serve children and families.  He is currently pursuing a PhD in Biostatistics at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory.  Karen Worthington has worked in a variety of child advocacy positions including Director of Program Development for Fulton County Juvenile Court, Staff Attorney with the Juvenile Advocacy Division of Georgia Indigent Defense Council, and Director of the Supreme Court Child Placement Project during its initial year of funding.

Michelle, Andy, and Karen have strong relationships with the primary people, agencies and organizations working on child protection issues in Georgia.  These relationships have carried over to the Clinic.  The Clinic is involved in projects with, or is providing training to, DFCS, the Council of Juvenile Court Judges, individual juvenile courts, Georgia Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), non-profit advocacy organizations and service providers, special assistant attorneys general representing DFCS, attorneys representing parents, attorney guardians ad litem for children, Georgia State University School of Social Work, and the University of Georgia School of Social Work.  These are the organizations with whom the Clinic currently partners to accomplish its mission.